I believe in conspiracies
John Laughland says the real nutters are those who
believe in al-Qa’eda and weapons of mass destruction
Believing in conspiracy theories is rather like having
been to a grammar school: both are rather socially
awkward to admit. Although I once sat next to a
sister-in-law of the Duke of Norfolk who agreed that
you can’t believe everything you read in the
newspapers, conspiracy theories are generally
considered a rather repellent form of intellectual
low-life, and their theorists rightfully the object of
scorn and snobbery. Writing in the Daily Mail last
week, the columnist Melanie Phillips even attacked
conspiracy theories as the consequence of a special
pathology, of the collapse in religious belief, and of
a ‘descent into the irrational’. The implication is
that those who oppose ‘the West’, or who think that
governments are secretive and dishonest, might need
psychiatric treatment.

In fact, it is the other way round. British and
American foreign policy is itself based on a series of
highly improbable conspiracy theories, the biggest of
which is that an evil Saudi millionaire genius in a
cave in the Hindu Kush controls a secret worldwide
network of ‘tens of thousands of terrorists’ ‘in more
than 60 countries’ (George Bush). News reports
frequently tell us that terrorist organisations, such
as those which have attacked Bali or Istanbul, have
‘links’ to al-Qa’eda, but we never learn quite what
those ‘links’ are. According to two terrorism experts
in California, Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud, this
is because they do not exist. ‘In the quest to define
the enemy, the US and its allies have helped to blow
al-Qa’eda out of proportion,’ they write. They argue
that the name ‘al-Qa’eda’ was invented in the West to
designate what is, in reality, a highly disparate
collection of otherwise independent groups with no
central command structure and not even a logo. They
claim that some terrorist organisations say they are
affiliated to bin Laden simply to gain kudos and
name-recognition for their entirely local grievances.

By the same token, the US-led invasion of Iraq was
based on a fantasy that Saddam Hussein was in, or
might one day enter into, a conspiracy with Osama bin
Laden. This is as verifiable as the claim that MI6
used mind control to make Henri Paul crash Princess
Diana’s car into the 13th pillar of the tunnel under
the Place de l’Alma. With similar mystic gnosis,
Donald Rumsfeld has alleged that the failure to find
‘weapons of mass distraction’, as Tony Blair likes to
call them, shows that they once existed but were
destroyed. Indeed, London and Washington have
shamelessly exploited people’s fear of the unknown to
get public opinion to believe their claim that Iraq
had masses of anthrax and botulism. This played on a
deep and ancient seam of fear about poison
conspiracies which, in the Middle Ages, led to pogroms
against Jews. And yet it is the anti-war people who
continue to be branded paranoid, even though the
British Prime Minister himself, his eyes staring
wildly, said in September 2002, ‘Saddam has got all
these weapons ...and they’re pointing at us!’

In contrast to such imaginings, it is perfectly
reasonable to raise questions about the power of the
secret services and armed forces of the world’s most
powerful states, especially those of the USA. These
are not ‘theories’ at all; they are based on fact. The
Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security
Agency, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National
Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency
and other US secret services spend more than
$30,000,000,000 a year on espionage and covert
operations. Do opponents of conspiracy theories think
that this money is given to the Langley, Virginia
Cats’ Home? It would also be churlish to deny that the
American military industry plays a very major role in
the economics and politics of the US. Every day at 5
p.m., the Pentagon announces hundreds of millions of
dollars in contracts to arms manufacturers all over
America — click on the Department of Defense’s website
for details — who in turn peddle influence through
donations to politicians and opinion-formers.

It is also odd that opponents of conspiracy theories
often allow that conspiracies have occurred in the
past, but refuse to contemplate their existence in the
present. For some reason, you are bordering on the
bonkers if you wonder about the truth behind events
like 9/11, when it is established as fact that in 1962
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyman L.
Lemnitzer, tried to convince President Kennedy to
authorise an attack on John Glenn’s rocket, or on a US
navy vessel, to provide a pretext for invading Cuba.
Two years later, a similar strategy was deployed in
the faked Gulf of Tonkin incident, when US engagement
in Vietnam was justified in the light of the false
allegation that the North Vietnamese had launched an
unprovoked attack on a US destroyer. Are such tactics
confined to history? Paul O’Neill, George Bush’s
former Treasury Secretary, has just revealed that the
White House decided to get rid of Saddam eight months
before 9/11.

Indeed, one ought to speak of a ‘conspir- acy of
silence’ about the role of secret services in
politics. This is especially true of the events in
Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It is the
height of irresponsibility to discuss the
post-communist transition without extensive reference
to the role of the spooks, yet our media stick
doggedly to the myth that their role is irrelevant.
During the overthrow of the Georgian president, Eduard
Shevardnadze, on 22 November 2003, the world’s news
outlets peddled a wonderful fairy-tale about a
spontaneous uprising — ‘the revolution of roses’, CNN
shlockily dubbed it — even though all the key actors
have subsequently bragged that they were covertly
funded and organised by the US.

Similarly, it is a matter of public record that the
Americans pumped at least $100 million into Serbia in
order to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, and
huge sums in the years before. (An election in
Britain, whose population is eight times bigger than
Yugoslavia’s, costs about two thirds of this.) This
money was used to fund and equip the Kosovo Liberation
Army; to stuff international observer missions in
Kosovo with hundreds of military intelligence
officers; to pay off the opposition and the so-called
‘independent’ media; and to buy heavily-armed Mafia
gangsters to come and smash up central Belgrade, so
that the world’s cameras could show a ‘people’s
revolution’.

At every stage, the covert aid and organisation
provided by the US and British intelligence agencies
were decisive, as they had been on many occasions
before and since, all over the world. Yet for some
reason, it is acceptable to say, ‘The CIA organised
the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran in
1953’, but not that it did it again in Belgrade in
2000 or Tbilisi in 2003. And in spite of the
well-known subterfuge and deception practised, for
instance, in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s,
people experience an enormous psychological reluctance
to accept that the British and American governments
knowingly lied us into war in 2002 and 2003. To be
sure, some conspiracy theories may be outlandish or
wrong. But it seems to me that anyone who refuses to
make simple empirical deductions ought to have his
head examined.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MPARENT7777/message/630


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